Flight Rising Discussion

Recently, our server provider was acquired by another company. As part of that acquisition, some technical changes to our server infrastructure are being conducted. Unfortunately for us, the timetable for some of this changeover work is somewhat tight, and may impact the website in undetermined ways.

We wanted to provide you with some forewarning, as we don't have a perfect estimate of how long or short the process will be. Over the next few weeks, the engineering team will be pooling many of their resources to make sure that our migration to the new hardware under the new provider is as smooth as possible. Bug fixes and feature work may need to take a brief pause while we concentrate our efforts.

With any luck, there will be limited impact to Flight Rising, but we will need to have maintenance periods to accommodate the move. Our estimate is that we will:

• Conduct brief unscheduled maintenance periods first as we retrofit a lot of our old systems to support the transition
• Have a large, scheduled maintenance period to perform the actual migration itself.
• Conduct brief unscheduled follow-up maintenance periods to address any issues that occur as a result of the migration.

We will of course make sure we communicate each of these as quickly as we can to you via our Site Status box on the front page.

Many of you know that we went through a server migration in our early days back in 2013, and that it was a fairly extensive amount of downtime. We wanted to assure everyone that we are in a much better place for these procedures today and don't anticipate that this migration will take nearly as long as the last one. That being said, we want to prepare everyone for the chance that some of the smaller periods could be anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours, and the longer period could be several hours to a couple days.

We will be doing everything on our end to make sure we impact your gameplay as little as possible, but want to preemptively ask for your understanding should we need to close down the site intermittently to make sure the transition is done efficiently and safely.

Thank you!

As a follow-up, I wanted to prime everyone for the possibility that preparing for and initiating the procedures for this migration may impact our ability to deliver content updates. At least until we're on the other side of it and are sure nothing is broken.

Our content management systems will be affected by the migration and as a team we don't really love the idea of releasing content right into a period of possibly frequent interruptions. If we release something, we'd like you to be able to use it without frustration. That being said, if content is slow or delayed while we work on this, you'll know why.

We plan on keeping this thread and the front page as updated as possible as we continue to prepare.

Thanks again for your understanding!

Today we are putting the site into maintenance for approximately 1 hour from 10:30 - 11:30 Server Time in order to prepare for eventual server migration. During this time Flight Rising will be unavailable. This is not the server migration itself, but will help us make sure that when that migration does happen, it will go as smoothly as possible.

Over the years we have added many features to Flight Rising and performed many configuration changes to improve performance and reliability. While many of these changes are easily portable to new servers, some of them were "one-off" manual changes that would be time consuming and error prone to re-apply. Over the past week we have been working to capture all of these changes in repeatable scripts so that we can apply them to the new servers automatically.

Today, we are going to apply those scripts to the Flight Rising production servers so that we can verify that they function properly. If everything goes well, we will have proven that the scripts work. If there are problems, we can fix the scripts now rather than having to diagnose problems during a stressful server migration downtime.

We are aiming to minimize the disruption this maintenance period causes, but it is possible that there will be some glitches and issues that we have to sort out afterward. We will be monitoring afterward to deal with any problems that arise.

We will be performing the server migration [b]Sunday, November 11[/b] starting at [b]06:00 server time[/b]. This is the [b]largest and most intensive part of the process[/b] and [i]Flight Rising[/i] will be offline/unavailable for an undetermined amount of time. After some successful pre-migration work, we are fairly confident that the migration will go smoothly, but the amount of time it will take is still unknown. As always, we'll be sure to communicate with you as much as possible via our social media channels. Just a few bits of information about tomorrow's migration that everyone should be aware of. [b]During the migration:[/b] [list][*]The site will likely be [b]entirely unreachable[/b] during the migration process, so if there are images you want to save or text you'd like to copy over to personal documents before it goes dark, now is a good time to do that. [*]The best place to look for updates will be our [url=https://www.facebook.com/flightrising][b]Facebook[/b][/url], [url=http://flightrising.tumblr.com/][b]Tumblr[/b][/url], and [url=https://twitter.com/flightrising][b]Twitter[/b][/url] accounts. [/list] [b]After the migration:[/b] [list] [*]DNS propagation for the new servers [b]may take up to 24 hours[/b], but we are hoping it will be [b]much shorter[/b] than that. This means that even though the migration will be complete, some players may have access to the site while others don't. Unfortunately, we don't have control over this part as it is heavily reliant on factors such as internet service providers and what region you're accessing the site from. [*][b]Purchasing of gem packages will likely need to be disabled[/b] for a period of time, so if the gem purchase page is unreachable, this is why. [*][b]Expect the site to be slow[/b] for awhile as we "spool up" on the new hardware. This is not unlike the site is waking up from a restless night of sleep; it'll be a bit groggy as things come online. [*]In addition to general slowness (which will improve over time), there are things that may just straight up not work. We will be attempting to fix a lot of this manually before letting players back on, but our engineering team will be monitoring heavily in the period after the migration, so please be sure to [b]help us identify issues by posting in our Bug Reports forum[/b]. Should you see a thread with a similar issue to yours, [b]please add to that thread instead of starting a new one[/b]. [*]We will be [b]feeding all dragons[/b] once the migration is fully complete. [/list]

The server migration is complete! At this point we are just monitoring to watch for any quirks or issues post-migration.